Apologetics 101: Lesson 3

Hello and welcome to this week’s installment of The World’s Worst and Most Useless Class! If you’ve been following along in my Apologetics 101 series (here and here), then you’ll know that I signed up for this class to learn a thing or two about Christian apologetics and arguments for God that I could expect a Christian to use against me. You’ll also know that I’ve learned neither of these things. Actually, I’ve learned nothing. Instead, I’ve watched my teacher make outrageous and unfounded claims about secular humanism and science, and I’ve watched my classmates diligently take notes on his every word without batting an eyelash.

In my first Apologetics 101 post, I took the most dumbfounding things that my teacher said over the course of the first week and compiled them into a list. My second post outlined some of the general problems with the class itself and my professor’s teaching style that emerged over the next four weeks. This post, however, will focus on one single class session. That’s right, he said more unbelievable, offensive, and flat-out wrong information and biased opinions in one hour than he did in four weeks. See for yourself: here are some of my direct quotes from my teacher and his PowerPoint from this week’s lecture entitled “Intro to Humanism”.

“Am I biased towards Christianity? Of course I am, it’s the truth.”

If it were the truth, then you wouldn’t need to be biased towards it. You would naturally and rationally conclude it to true with no bias at all, just because it makes sense and is true. Kind of like evolution.

“All knowledge requires faith.”

“Faith in reason must precede all other faiths.”

“Philosophical naturalists make assumptions based on faith.”

My teacher pushed this point throughout the lecture more than any other. His goal was to explain to the students how they should respond if a humanist were to make the claim to them that their Christian belief is based solely off of blind faith. Time and time again he went back to the old “Well you have faith in your own reason!”

I’m not an expert on philosophy, and I don’t know everything about fallacies, but I’d say this is one if I ever saw one: my teacher holds up an object (he has done this using a piece of paper once and a pen once) and asks a random student: “What is this?” The student responds, “It’s a pen.” He says, “How do you know that?” The student isn’t sure how to answer. My professor says “You’re just making an assumption based off of faith! Your faith that this is a pen is no better than your faith in God!”

First of all, knowing what he is trying to do, if I had been the student called on, I would have said, “Well, it depends on what feature truly defines it as a pen. It looks like a pen, it feels like a pen, it writes like a pen, and it clicks and has ink in it. So I’m pretty confident, based on those observations, that it is a pen.”

But that’s beside the point. The problem is that he compares faith in an unseen and unobserved (and supposedly unobservable) and untouchable and unearthly yet extremely specific deity with belief in something that can be directly observed. I suppose I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I believe that everything I perceive is 100% accurate, but I have sufficient reason to trust my senses over something I’ve never seen, heard, or felt, and I might argue that no one ever has. He made another comment about trusting scientists or other humanists who also have fallible senses, or having faith in evolution. I know that “having faith in evolution” sounds wrong, but if you want to put it that way, then so be it. At least there’s evidence of it. It’s more reasonable to have faith in something that can be scientifically demonstrated than in something that cannot.

“The big bang theory is ONLY A THEORY!!!!!!“

It requires a great deal more faith to believe in the spontaneous generation doctrine of humanism or the randomness of all nature

No, my friends, this is not a quote from Ken Ham. These are both direct quotes from my apologetics teacher, who has a doctorate and is a pastor of two churches, whose class is costing me thousands of dollars. I don’t think I should need to explain to anyone just how or why this is so disgustingly wrong, but if you want me to, let me know in the comments, and I will explain it to you there.

“Humanists hate intelligent design more than anything and get really really mad when people put it in [public] schools. Why do they care so much if it’s really just a silly theory?”

First of all, I would like to point him towards the time five minutes ago when he got extremely worked up about the big bang, which he referred to as “only a theory”. Why does he care about it so much if it’s just a theory???

Second of all, intelligent design is not a scientific theory. It was not discovered via the scientific method. It was “discovered” when people were upset that they couldn’t teach the Genesis creation story verbatim as science and history in their public classrooms, so they made up “intelligent design” as an alternate idea to teach to children so that creation would still be represented in lessons on origins. Creationism is not science. It should not be in science classes. If you believe that your religion is true, teach it in your church. Don’t teach it to the rest of our kids at school in their public science classes. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

He pointed us towards a book by Michael Behe that supposedly sparked the intelligent design movement called Darwin’s Black Box. Hearing the name of the book reminded me of a blog post I read a few months back about intelligent design and why it shouldn’t be in science classes or the science section of public libraries. Admittedly, I thought the post was about Darwin’s Black Box, but it actually focuses on a book by Stephen Meyer called Darwin’s Doubt. It’s an informative and intriguing post nonetheless, and I encourage you to check it out here.

The suggestion to read Darwin’s Black Box ended Friday’s Apologetics lecture, but I want to end my post with a tangent that my teacher took earlier in class about how much he hates science.

I’ve mentioned before how my teacher often expresses his hatred towards science vis a vis its nature of changing as new evidence emerges and information that we once thought was true gets modified. In his free time, he’s a bird expert, and as examples he will often accuse scientists of not being able to predict every time with 100% accuracy the migration dates and patterns of every single type of bird. If scientists can’t accurately predict that, how can they predict anything more important, like evolutionary claims?

His example today, though, was that scientists are constantly pushing back the dates that they believe the earliest humans existed. I, of course, find it quite fascinating that we still continue to find new evidence of where we came from and when modern humans first arrived on the scene. You can guess that my professor doesn’t see it that way, though. He actually got himself so worked up that he was yelling in class as he expressed his anger that archaeologists can find a bone the size of a piece of chalk, use it to estimate that it is a homo sapien bone, and use that to estimate the time that the earliest homo sapiens walked the Earth.

He ridiculed the way that National Geographic goes on for pages and pages about the discovery of these tiny bones and their implications, and he mocked the way that those in the scientific community see such articles and applaud the scientists in awe. He of course made the claim that it must take more faith to arrive to the conclusion that a tiny bone can tell you when human history began than it would to believe in the story of Adam and Eve. He even asked students in the class to back him up. Most nodded along when asked “Isn’t it unbelievable that scientists are praised for this and that people really trust them?”, but if he had called on me, I would have said “Well, they probably used the scientific method, and they are probably experts on what bones go to what animal and how to test how old a bone is, so I’d say yeah, it is actually pretty amazing that they are able to do that, and yes, I trust their ever-changing words.”

I’m starting to be more and more visibly angry during this class. When he made the comment about having faith in the doctrine of spontaneous generation, I actually facepalmed a little bit. I’m going to try to do what I can to set my professor straight with some of these misconceptions; I plan to write my term paper as an informational real introduction to secular humanism, written from the perspective of someone who is not so biased in their own views that they can’t see straight. For now, though, I’ll continue to sit through class as the undercover atheist and gather as many notes as I can.

37 Replies to “Apologetics 101: Lesson 3”

Do you plan to go into battle against Christians when you are fully out? This leads me to ask – what is your major?

Faith ‘s second definition at dictionary.com is “belief that is not based on proof.” According this definition faith does not provide any knowledge at all. You might hit something that is true, but knowledge needs to be justified for the most part by evidence and coherent reasoning.

No it is the point, or at least part of the point. It looks like a pen. It is used for writing, so we can test to see if this is correct. With faith you do not have a test.

Faith’s first definition from dictionary.com is “confidence or trust in a person or thing.” With this definition when applied toward people and things (theory of evolution) is different from trust in a non-existent entity or false theory. This shows that faith has nothing to do with truth itself. Proof provides truth not trust. You can trust a friend to do something for you does mean that your friend is actually going to carry out whatever it is you trusted them to do. Trust does not mean what is trusted is true.

When we use the scientific method, we test whether or not our explanation is correct. It is a tool that is use as part of finding out how the world is. A simple example is I think I have a fever (explanation). By taking my temperature with a thermometer I can do an experiment (test) to see if the explanation is right. After I perform this test, I can tentatively say I have a fever. Tentatively because the thermometer could not be calibrated correctly. If I perform a test to see if it is, then I can have a higher confidence that I have a fever. Notice that the explanation is critical here, without it there can be no test. Nothing of this scenario can be transfer to anything to do with the supernatural.

I think you mean paleontologists instead of archaeologists.

It takes more time and effort to test evolution by natural selection than to state that god created Adam and Eve, which cannot even be tested, and explains far less, than what science knows about human evolution.

Well actually, to be honest… Not to write an entire novel (just too enthralled right now), I actually adore this blog! Though my time has been somewhat thorough here lately, I think I might need to catch up on it… I haven’t really read Dawkin’s best seller (though I still would like to inquire of your own dissection for some collaborative reciprocity, if you will) yet, but it is actually about to arrive on my shelf soon. However, I also enjoy Dr. Jonathan Sarfati’s the Greatest Hoax on Earth.

Also, my first inquiry regarding your apologetics “professor” is to please offer us his academic background. Is he reputable (doesn’t seem very likely to my best inference, quite obviously)? Where exactly did he complete his studies? This is extremely vital to shed the light to the rest of the students attending. Because to me in this case it appears that his propagation to his students is more of confirmatory bias than anything, and I personally commend you for taking his notes!!! I was actually so outraged by soon finding that my own “psychologist” covered up his studies and was “licensed” just because the conservative government here down South had validated him just because he was an experienced minister in divinity. It was entirely repulsive, regardless of his average reviews. Needless to say, that wasn’t very long for me. lol
Which is exactly the reason why I enjoy more research-based university departments, such of which as primary examples such are campuses such as Cambridge & Oxford, etc., rather than a little “Roll Tide” school such as Tuscaloosa, though it has a separate academic specialty (law). Football team is awesome witch Saban though! LOL

Secondly, it seems to me (not only agreeing with most of everyone else here about only one-sided “science of faith” he was utilizing) as if he was too morbidly condescending with his mocking you are referring to. All I can currently think of is the hermenutics of Matthew 7. And this most definitely does not align with this specific passage in context at all.
Really. Is there a beam in this man’s eye?

Finally I would like to ask of you (and this is actually top of my list I am delving into right now, as my personal fave… lol) is your epistemic method of logic?? Not exactly sure about psychology in and of itself correlating to this, but I have just been wondering about the three primary methods: abductive (which I am pretty sure is me; i.e., “Whenever confronting complex equations, the simplest solution? Is most likely the correct one.”), inductive (bottom to top), and deductive (top to bottom). But I just need to know your thoughts concerning this, please?? Is this what we need to utilize, or… What we are naturally inclined to from birth, and does any of this correlate to Genesis 3, explaining why our maximum brain capacity of utilization is only 10%??
I need to know more of what you all know, and have actually came across this AWESOME YouTube channel of Matt Dillahunty (uses inductive epistemology). What really intrigues me about this atheist., is he is actually an atheist like you are. They are more neutral, and do not care what anyone else thinks, yet are also possessing inquisitive minds simultaneously. Which, in effect, makes us all accelerate in our cognitive learning to be literally skyrocketed, simply because we are not reprobate-minded like the anti-theists, who have already made their minds up, and begin adamantly arguing like the condescending country Pharisees I am dealing with here primarily with mundane religion and repugnant legalistic traditions, instead of debating, which we are all here to do concerning simple metaphysics. However the primary reason this dude is so awesome, is because he lets us call-in our arguments/debates and actually talk it out so passively. From his own perspective. It is literally an open invitation!!

Please keep us updated! Quite obviously I am behind, and am greatly obliged for people like you with your sources you have cited!! Makes me think so highly of you folks, in all seriousness. And yes, you are correct. Science is most definitely not a salad bar… 😉

Let us know what you think of this, too, please… If you could post about it when time allows…? It is Daniel Dennett’s latest book which marks five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness. The man’s alumni is actually from Harvard and Oxford (as I previously mentioned). Though I also have Perry Stone’s “Breaking the God Code”, as well… Feedback, please?http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist

Wow. I don’t think I could survive that class. Then again, I’m surrounded at work by right-wing Christian evangelicals every day — they’re the reason that I stay anonymous online when talking about atheism.

Hey, I’ve been following your blog for awhile but never really comment till now.
I’m sorry about your predicament with your apologetics class, it honestly sounds like something I would either fall asleep over, or end up just walking out of, and ask someone to fill me in on the basic assignment later because I’m all for hearing the argument of the other side of the table, but not when they are so stupid and ignorant they just make you want to vomit a little.
I do have a natural distain for religion, and this is one of the reasons why. They keep telling themselves the same argument over and over. I wish that Christians and Atheists would stop arguing over the same stuff and actually get into more important topics.
CA. You’ve actually inspired me to start a blog of my own (hence why i’m typing this now) and speak my mind on a subject that used to cause me great discomfort and stress whenever it came up. Thank you, for giving me something to read every week, and for sharing your story. It’s given me better realization that there are people in worse situations then I am.

So long comment short, i’m sorry to hear you going through this horrible class, and thank you for inspiring me.

When someone has to present a very cleverly worded argument to get their point across, always remember to go back to the basics. The entire belief system of the church was implemented in the 4th century based in the most cleverly worded philosophy. Not any truth was proven or peer reviewed. The philosophers won the day

“I’m going to try to do what I can to set my professor straight with some of these misconceptions; I plan to write my term paper as an informational real introduction to secular humanism, written from the perspective of someone who is not so biased in their own views that they can’t see straight. ”

I honestly don’t think that will accomplish anything useful. Your professor is so entrenched in this mindset that a paper from a student is unlikely to change anything. Please look up “The Backfire Effect” (Start here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect).

When people are confronted with information that contradicts their biases, the result is usually that they dig in even harder and believe in their position even more strongly than before. Plus your professor’s job teaching this class is probably linked to his convictions about these misconceptions. If he’s so biased in his own views that he can’t see straight, all that you will get out of a confrontational paper is a bad grade, at best. Better to try to reach some of the students in the class, which might be done with asking good questions during classtime.

That makes sense. I’ve got to write a paper on something though, and I get to choose and secular humanism interests me, and I suppose I should learn more about it anyways. Even though it won’t change his mind and will probably continue to believe crazy and wrong things about humanists, at least he’ll see that not all of his students actually agree with him.

As long as you are writing for your own reasons, and not because you think you can change his views, that works.

I wanted to point out one of his strawmen, “Philosophical naturalism”. I’ve had an apologist brother-in-law also jump to the conclusion that because I’m an atheist, that I then MUST be a “naturalist” but what he described was specifically philosophical naturalism. It sounds like he was taught to make that assumption by a teacher very much like yours.

I’m not a philosophical naturalist (nothing outside our natural world exists, or can exist), I’m a methodological naturalist (we are part of a natural physical world, and the only way we have of investigating things is by investigation of that natural physical world). If there exist things outside our natural universe, and they interact in some way with the things in our universe (including interactions with human brains), then we can investigate those interactions in a systematic way. If the things outside our universe do not interact with this universe, then we have no ability to investigate them, and they are also irrelevant to our existence. I think many more secular humanists would fall under this description than under his “philosophical naturalism”

This class is probably based on a kantian view of the world which basically just agrees with Hume. Hume is one of the biggest problems for atheism. Watch the Gordon Stein vs Greg Bahnsen debate https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=anGAazNCfdY to see why. But Kant is a bad solution to Hume especially for Christians. In recent years wiser men have to back to Thomas Reid and simply rejected Hume outright because he wasn’t a good philosopher. There is far too much here to respond to, and these posts on apologetics are pretty weak because it sounds like a relatively lame class and as you’ve admitted you don’t know much about philosophy. So I’m gonna do a podcast where I go through each of your posts and explain what I think is going on and I’ll post each one on the comments section of each. I would like to have you on the show at some point, but I “understand” your situation. In any case responding to your posts will be sort of like having you on.

As a liberal Christian who has the same annoying conversations with conservatives, I mostly agree with you. I’ve had more luck conveying the problems with those sorts of sentiments by pointing out that the conservatives don’t really believe their own aplogetics. I bet your apologist would rush his child (if he has one) to the nearest hospital and pay for the best doctors he could possibly afford, should his kid ever get sick. Conservative Christians trust scientists when it really matters to them – whenever their lives (or the lives of their loved ones) are at risk. They believe in science – we all do. It’s just that when it suites them, conservatives are in denial of their trust in scientists. Don’t waste time trying to defend science to people who already believe in science. Just show them their hypocrisy.

Exactly. I think he has mentioned a few times that it’s not science itself he dislikes but scientists, who are obviously doing their best but are still not perfect. And when their conclusions clash with his interpretation of the bible, that’s when he gets REALLY mad.

Thanks for Neil for pointing out “Liars for Jesus”, that was the first thought that popped into my head as I read your blog.

Apologetics to me is taking any topic and trying to jerry-rig it as an argument for a god. It’s disingenuous. I haven’t read your first two blogs but I’ll get to them when I get a chance… following along 🙂

I don’t think the majority of regular christians are intentionally lying. Apologetics is more like trying to rationalize some sense into something that makes no sense. To a believer they have to find a way to accept and wrap their head around something that is crazy.

Jordan Peterson and someone who knows how to create an interactive website where BEFORE you sign up for a course and spend thousands on it, you can plug in the course details and it’ll tell you if this course will be a waste of time and money because they’re not teaching you how to think, but indoctrinating you into their club or belief. Sounds like you have the right mind-set though. You won’t change the professors mind or set him straight one iota. Google ‘Confirmation Bias’ The more you argue with reason the more locked in he’ll become.

When the professor hold up a pen and asks, “What is this?” A good response would be to walk up to the front, take the pen and use it to write. Then hand the pen back. No words. No faith. No belief.

I really like that example of the pen. It is a lot easier to demonstrate that it works without faith than it would for God. And being a senior with extra room in my schedule, I didn’t really have much to lose in signing up for the class. Yes, it’s a waste of my time and my teacher doesn’t know what he’s talking about and I’m learning nothing, but it’s the only class that is related to this whole debating-God’s-existence thing that I’m so interested in. Plus, it gives me something to blog about. And if there’s going to be a class this bad, I want to be there to see the madness for myself, if that makes sense.

Ya, that makes a lot of sense. I love your insights into the class and how you’re forming your own views on what the teacher is teaching. You’ve taken a nothing class and turned it into something. That’s awesome. The problem is, as you’ve noted on your blog, most other students are sitting taking notes, accepting what he’s teaching as true or don’t care and only want to pass.
Anyway, good work. Awesome work. I enjoy your writings.

They call it “apologetics”, because they would be too embarrassed to call it “lying for Jesus.”

“All knowledge requires faith.”

This depends on what one means by “knowledge”. For me, knowledge is abilities (or “knowhow”) tested in experience. But he probably goes by the standard philosopher’s “Justified true belief”. Except that he appears to be ignoring the “justified” part of that, or treating faith as a kind of justification.

“Faith in reason must precede all other faiths.”

Perhaps your teacher has a good definition of “reason” (though I doubt that). For me, reason is a method of testing ideas. And testing is the opposite of faith. For sure, we can come up with ideas that need more testing than that of reason alone. And good reasoners know that, and don’t blindly accept those ideas.

“Humanists hate intelligent design more than anything and get really really mad when people put it in [public] schools. Why do they care so much if it’s really just a silly theory?”

I don’t “hate” ID. I don’t even mind if it is taught in public schools, just as long as it is taught as philosophy or religion. What I “hate” is the attempt by religionists and politicians to force it into the science class.

Fair’s fair. If the religionists want ID to be taught in the science class, then they should allow science to be taught the religion class.

I agree. And if you believe scientific claims, I suppose you could say that it takes faith to accept that they weren’t faulty (although if something has been tested enough times it’s unlikely that the same thing went wrong every time), but at least scientific claims have been empirically tested in the first place, unlike supernatural or creationism claims.

If you are in his class, and this outraged, perhaps it’s time to “innocently” ask a few of the questions you would like to ask him. It does seem to me that he’s treadling over his own statements constantly, but no one is actually calling him on it. If you’re paying for this class, then you have a right to ask questions.

i.e. he criticizes people who find ancient bones for having ‘faith’ that these are ancient proof of mankind’s existence, yet he suggests that we should have faith that an invisible spirit rules the planet, with no proof whatsoever. Where, btw, are Adam’s bones?
What an annoying man.

Tha pathetic part of this is if some Christian archeologists claimed to find Adams bones the church would embrace it like flies on shit. The Jesus tomb, shroud, and other guesses have been embraced by faith alone. Find a piece of red cloth in Israel and it belonged to Jesus.

and they have, after all, unearthed what is claimed to be Noah’s Ark. How, after this many centuries, anything could remain, is beyond me, but by god there was a chunk of old wood up there so that must be it.
This making it up out of air and spit is both dangerous and amusing, but sadly people take it way too seriously. Any cave, any rock. Any old cloth with a mysterious image on it. A statue of Mary that weeps. Not guesses, necessarily, just very hopeful “signs”. Like finding an arrowhead on your forest path and telling everyone you found an old Indian trail…
But to be fair, haven’t they embraced their god on the same faith alone, and he doesn’t even SHOW himself…?

There’s a few reasons why I don’t do this, from being nonconfrontational, to not being openly atheist in the class, to knowing that his mind would never change. I feel like he’s so far off with the bones thing and with the faith thing that he wouldn’t cooperate if someone trying to show him reason on it. That being said, I still want my humanism paper to be informative and try to at least give him a clearer idea of what humanism actually is, even though he’ll probably deny it and continue to believe what he does (I might as well still write it because I have to write a paper about something). I also plan to give him terrible ratings come time for course/professor evaluations at the end of the semester. I may even link to these posts. Oh, what trouble he’ll be in then….

im thinking, any questions you might ask of him would be directed not at him, necessarily, but more at the students who seem to be swallowing his bait without even thinking about it. Sometimes the best part of a question is not who you’re talking to, but who’s listening to it from the audience?

I can see with most of what you’ve said here. Except what you’ve said said about faith. God functions in the same way as the pen. If it clicks sounds writes like a pen. From observations it’s a pen. God is the same way. If it manifests like God it is God. If it were observable to everyone it would contradict the Bible. Which teaches that God is mysterious. And no one has seen him. Literally. Some of your expectations for observation would not function with what the Bible teaches about God. The faith it takes to use the pen for the first time is made true by the observables. It’s the same with God. I’m not commenting to start a tift.

You say that “if it manifests like God, it is God” which implies that you can observe God, which I assume you mean to mean that believers can observe God, but nonbelievers cannot. Fine, except that you’ve also written that no one has seen God. “Literally”. But, there are supposedly many “red words” in Bibles that show that God is speaking directly to individuals in plain English.

So, your contradictions are: God is observable to believers, but not so observable that believers can offer any concrete examples (something that shows the “pen writing”). The second contradiction is about whether or not anyone can actually observe God, since as far as I know, God only speaks in standard languages to people with diagnosed mental illness.

Most of the time, what Christians point to as evidence of God, scientists say “please learn more science”. That isn’t to say that a sunset isn’t beautiful, but it’s caused by the rotation of the Earth and specific atmospheric conditions.

The problem with Christians who hate science is that they demand why’s for everything and science will probably never be able to say why things happen. A genetic defect may cause a miscarriage, but we don’t know why it happened to this specific couple. Even when we look at the odds of the defect popping up, it’s still just “luck” that the fetus was the 1 out of 4 probabilities.

Religious people so desperate for certainty need help. I believe that many suffer from some sort of mental illness and I don’t mean this as an insult. Going back to the example of the miscarriage, looking for why there is the equivalent of asking why the ball landed on 44 Black in Roulette (or whatever option makes sense for Roulette). Sometimes stuff just happens and that’s okay!

Oh. About predicting bird migration. A few years ago UVA’s envi sci dept came up with “The Bay Game” which was a computer program/game that folks could use to manipulate variables that interact with the Chesapeake Bay and observe the projected results of those variable changes over time. It not only illustrated how we can help and hurt the bay, but also illustrated how infinite the number of variables can be. The programmers had to decide whether to include, for example, something like the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Because yes, this will probably affect the bay in some way, but is it really relevant? Predicting anything to the day or minute is impossible because there’s always an unaccounted variable or 300. And that’s okay!

To believe that God is actively involved in everything only serves to prove that God caused the miscarriage, God caused your number to be missed, and God whispered in the Monarch butterfly’s ear and said “go further north this year and stay too late”.

I suspect that people are afraid to think. I don’t mean thinking about stuff like nuclear weapons or what’s for dinner, but afraid to think for themselves about life in general. So they turn to their invisible friend up there and ask HIM what HE thinks. They have been taught since birth that God is a real spirit (can anyone say oxymoron really slowly) and he knows everything we do, sorta like Santa Claus, and he will guide us. We pray, he answers us. Mysteriously. We have to figure out the why of it and the how, and then we tell ourselves that God answered our prayers. It never occurs to anyone that they just rationalized the answer, for good or ill, all by themselves. “oh no”, they would say, “God told me.”

I think, for me, that’s the whole ball. Religious people ‘let’ god tell them what to do, atheists and non believers know they are running the show themselves. If I screw up, I take the blame. But if I do a good thing, hey, I get the credit.